THE ULTIMATE ANGLING BUCKET LIST

was good to be back in the car for the long drive home, with bright red faces struggling to stay awake
as the heater blasted out at full bore.
That is the grand sum total of my grayling experience. Limited in the extreme, but in some respects to
be envied I'm sure. So it would be foolish of me to say anything regarding tactics for grayling. What I
can do however is have an opinion on other related matters and offer that instead.
These are magnificent fish. They fight well, are obliging both on bait and on the fly, and offer
themselves as a worthy challenge for those times when other game fish species are for reasons of
spawning seasons, off limits.
Why then are they so blatantly looked down upon in the way that they are, and why are they still classed
in some circles as coarse fish. True, they spawn at the same time as coarse fish, which is what allows
them to be fished for when trout and salmon are seasonally off limits, and at any time at all in Scotland
where coarse fish have no close season at all.
At the same time, they possess an adipose fin which makes them a salmonid species. Yet on the southern
chalk streams where they are regarded as vermin, they were regularly removed by all means possible
and knocked on the head, supposedly to improve the brown trout prospects, though this has been shown
not to be the case. An attitude that has only recently started to change thanks to persuasive pressure
from the grayling society.
CHAR Salvelinus alpinus
Bucket List status – result
Because char in the British Isles present themselves as stunted relict populations confined to deeper
cooler lakes, identification gets a bit of a kick start here by virtue of the fact that only certain waters
contain them, all of which, except for perhaps a few in the wilds of Scotland, are already known.
Elsewhere, particularly to the south of
Cumbria, except for a couple of
populations in the Snowdonia region
of Wales, they simply aren't present,
unless introduced as a novelty by stillwater
fly fishery owners which does
happen from time to time.
Under normal circumstances then, in
natural situations, identification is a
case of is the fish a brown trout or is it
a char. Wild trout with their golden
flanks and black and red spots rule
themselves out immediately. In
breeding livery, char are bright vermilion red on their belly up on to their lower flanks.
This fades gradually once the spawning period is over, leaving the fish a dark greenish grey on the back
and flanks, with a generous covering of pinkish white spots. The clincher however are the pectoral,
pelvic and anal fins, all of which are very obviously red in colour with a prominent white stripe along
their leading edge.
When I was a kid, I saved up my pocket money and bought myself a copy of the Observers Book
Freshwater Fishes. In it was this mystical species, the arctic char, which at that time was thought to be
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